Scattered Thoughts . . .

M y health has been improving this past week, finally, after a lot of physical therapy to build up my strength enough to walk around normally (mostly, anyway).  I'm still struggling with breathing problems due to the long-COVID thing but my long-COVID inflammation seems to finally be improving.  Since I had some strength and the sun was out, I thought it would be a good day to head outside with some astronomy gear.   The sun was penetrating through a lot of haze and high thin clouds today which is better than overcast skies so I decided I should take advantage of this unusually nice weather.  I could use all the practice I can get in preparation of the eclipse.  Unfortunately, I definitely overdid it today so I'm back to having difficulty walking and even standing.  This isn't great weather for solar observing nor imaging but I needed to take advantage of the fair weather with no threats of precipitation. I was thinking that I'd just take a couple of telescopes outside

I 'm still feeling rather lousy and coughing whenever I move so I'm laying low at home.  This morning, however, I accomplished a few small maintenance tasks on my astronomy gear.   First, I wanted to install a better saddle on my newly converted EXOS2 manual mount (photo at right).  I don't care for saddles with a single bolt holding my telescope on the mount.  I prefer two pressure clamps holding my telescopes.  I had ordered an appropriate saddle a few weeks ago and it arrived this past week.  I just needed to drill a hole and then assemble it so that was a small and easy task that proved to be unremarkable.  Then I moved to my best telescope.  My Explore Scientific 102mm APO refractor recently developed a sticky focuser.  It wasn't sticking to a complete stop but it was not as smooth as I like it.  Any bit of stickiness in the focuser causes some vibration in your view so I new I wanted to resolve this little problem before I got worse.  This task was a little more i

I t was a very rare beautiful day yesterday.  Lukey and Kenzie were with us for the day too.  The moment I saw how clear the sky was on this morning, I knew I should be setting up for some solar astronomy at some point during the day.   Because of trees around our house, I have only a relatively short window of opportunity the first thing in the morning and then a relatively short window of opportunity in the early afternoon for solar astronomy.  Two short windows of opportunity are better than no windows of opportunity though.  The sun would be behind trees all the rest of the time.  I chose to set up for solar astronomy first thing in the morning before Lukey and Kenzie even arrived at the house.   I knew that if I waited for early afternoon, then I'd likely have to contend with wind.  When it comes to astronomy, wind can be as limiting as clouds so I knew that my chances of a good session were during that early morning window of opportunity.  The wind usually picks up by late mo